"Die Soldaten' in New York

Into the muck of military life
(and no way out for the audience)

JIM RUTTER

Anyone who thinks Abu Ghraib hit the low point of military barbarity hasn’t seen the RuhrTriennale’s devastating production of Bernd Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), now at New York’s Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. In Zimmerman’s opera (based on Jakob Lenz’s 18th Century play of the same name), the very nature of military life leads soldiers to commit acts of brutality, becoming wild dogs that destroy the sanctity of the home, ruin the social order, and destroy any pretension to happiness.

As the priest puts it, in a garrison town “One can’t step outside without seeing a soldier fondling a girl.” That, or raping her.

To the off-duty officers reclining nude in individual stalls in a bathhouse, “A whore is always a whore.” For the military chaplain trying to retain some vestige of civility, “A whore is made, not born.” This slender distinction is the crux of the opera, a story of social forces and their consequences for any society that keeps a military class.

Papa as pimp

The protagonist, Marie Wesener (Claudia Barainsky), begins respectably enough. Engaged to the draper Stolzius (Claudio Otelli), she coyly frets over the letters sent to her by the Baron Desportes (Peter Hoare). She may lack an education, but Marie and her initially protective father both possess enough knowledge of soldiers to recognize the emptiness of Desportes’ compliments.

Soon enough, though, Marie’s father sees the Baron as a way to advance his position and turns into a lecherous pimp— buying Marie nice dresses to wear to the theater, and changing his advice: “Date up.” And once daddy— the measure of virtue for trusting young girls— points Marie down this path, true love means little to a girl who guides her affection by the desire to improve her lot. She dyes her hair red, breaks her engagement to Stolzius, begins an affair with Desportes and, when the latter gets called away, takes up with Major Mary (Kay Stiefermann), who showers her with gifts.

‘Please remain seated’

This was no ordinary story of betrayal, and certainly no ordinary production, but an ambitious effort to bring a critically successful German production to New York—seats, rails, sets, symphony, singers, and all. I’m accustomed to ushers showing me to my seat, but not to ushers advising, “For your safety, please remain seated.”

Rightly so. The moment the mammoth 110-instrument orchestra began to play—with one of the harshest opening notes I’ve ever heard—the entire seating area began moving down the 12-foot-wide, near-football-field-length stage as the soldiers marched toward us from the rear of the Armory’s cavernous hall.

Director David Pountney’s direction aptly captured Zimmermann’s ideal of theatrical immersion. (Zimmermann, an early embracer of multimedia in performing arts, initially envisioned his opera taking place on 12 separate small stages, using three movie screens and pre-recorded music to complete the immersive effect.) The staging machinery drew the audience into the vast, sprawling sense of this opera, where the small town and little lives become epic in scope, and the slippery slope from virtue to ruin slides down the muck of military life like a pig’s trough turned on its end. Multiple scenes overlapped; and unlike a proscenium, where you can shift your glance from left to right, here the distance of the long thin stage superbly adds an element of time dilation to the viewing. We in the audience know that scenes take place simultaneously, but they appear as if they’re happening in the past, present and future all at once, capturing Zimmerman’s idea that the cruelty onstage represents the military ideal as a state of nature—occurring both in man’s prehistory and the uncivilized regions of his future.

From schoolboys to rapists

The soldiers at first appear like mere schoolboys, trading insults and blows, attempting to playfully mock rape one of the bathhouse attendants, but displaying more philosophical banter than brutal atrocities. Not until Stolzius decides to challenge their “right” to sexually disgrace every woman in town do they become vicious. Stolzius—an appropriate Latinized German for “the proud one”— tries to chase down the Baron in the aforementioned coffeehouse, only to encounter a line of soldiers standing six abreast at a latrine, a scene made disgustingly voyeuristic because the “moving seats” thrust me into the stall next to them. They know why he’s there, and rather than empathize, they laugh in the face of a jealous man.

When not even the military chaplain can help him, Stolzius enlists in the military himself, a beta wolf waiting for an opening to take down the bigger animal who’s stolen his girl. While Zimmerman’s mostly atonal score offers little opportunity to hear his anguished baritone, Otelli compensated with his fierce expressions, ending the first act with a look of anger and jealous revenge that could have bored through granite when telling his disappointed mother, “I’m not mad.”

Few musically pleasing moments

Though the score is musically complex— each scene expresses a different musical form— it offers few musically pleasing moments (taken as a whole, it’s overwhelming, and brilliantly expresses the chaos and violence that seethes beneath the well-ordered pulse of military life). Only Helen Field, as the Countess— a woman trying to save Marie from disgrace— possesses an athletic voice capable of the vocal contortions the score requires. Hoare nearly manages this feat, but the sumptuous tones of this tenor beg for clear, melodic passages.

When director Pountney finally unleashes the soldiers from all constraints, he achieves a far greater effect, because he’s let the tension build to a crescendo that matches the violence of the music. Drums rattle like machine gun fire when Stolzius finally curses Marie.

Finally, in a scene whose stage directions read, “Everyone gets raped,” the tuxedoed officers sport pig’s heads with metal zippered mouths, and we see Marie—as well as a succession of girls in similar straits— passed between the men as the audience rolls slowly down the stage in pursuit.

Wolfgang Goebbel’s heavy-handed lighting works superbly, using floodlights and direct-downward positioned focused lighting to make every scene as stark as possible, giving these characters no shadows or gray area of justification in which to hide their reprehensible actions.

If Lenz’s play and Zimmerman’s opera were not revolting enough, Pountney’s staging (and the flourishes, i.e. Santa Claus as rapist) made certain that no one would leave the theater without feeling repulsed, and the moveable seats transform the audience from passive observers to eager onlookers. Unlike those 38 New Yorkers who impassively turned away from Kitty Genovese’s murder in 1964, we’re forced to watch the drama, becoming active participants (not to mention paying customers) in the atrocity.

One last scream

Early in Act I, the officers philosophically try to convince the chaplain that “Even the worst farce does more good than all the sermons.” After an evening of Die Soldaten, it’s clear that not even Bertolt Brecht could have dreamed up better anti-war propaganda.

In the final scene, the ruined Marie—now a prostitute—walks through streets littered with soldiers’ dead bodies, rifling their pockets for money. The surviving officers carouse and drink, delivering their final verdict: She was a whore from the start and only wanted their gifts in return for sexual favors. Hoofbeats and soldiers march to drum rolls in the distance, and the Zimmerman’s final note is a long scream of horror.